


SKY SCRAPER

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Manga Spoilers, author returns the bird metaphors for another round of what the fuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:15:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25285963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: Icarus gets a day job.
Comments: 29
Kudos: 302





	SKY SCRAPER

_what things are steadfast? not the birds._

  
When he was younger, all his favorite manga characters would cut their hair short to mark the start of a great change in their lives, so when he got older, he figured he’d try growing his hair out instead, and see what would happen. Perhaps Udai Tenma was looking for a sign. Or perhaps he was just bored of looking like every other guy in Tokyo, with the romcom drama haircut and the Uniqlo jacket, the black phone case with the useless rubber bits on the corners. Tenma didn’t really want to spend fifty-thousand yen on a haircut. He also didn’t want to do it himself, and risk winding up bald. So it made sense, to him, to go the other way. Graduate from high school. Quit volleyball. Grow out your hair.

Going the other way was, of course, not the point. There had never really been a point to anything Tenma had done in his life. He was not a boy possessed with dreams of spectacular caliber; he much preferred squatting in the grass, poking at bugs with the blunt end of a stick until they poked back, or ran away. Volleyball found him, the way some people wander into a room with no exit. One moment he was Udai Tenma, short guy. The next, he was Udai Tenma, short volleyball guy. You know how the rest goes.

If you don’t know how the rest goes, this is how it goes: boy joins volleyball team. Boy gets told by everyone, including his biology teacher and his mother, that he is too short to succeed in volleyball team. Boy ignores everyone, especially his biology teacher and his mother, and trains really hard. Boy trains really, really hard. Boy becomes ace. Boy becomes king of the world.

Boy steps onto the orange court. There are lights in his eyes, there is a god watching him from the bleachers. Boy is invincible.

Boy doesn’t make it to the light at the end of the tunnel. Boy stops to admire the flowers. Boy quits volleyball.

For a while after he quit volleyball, his entire life seemed to revolve around the fact that he quit volleyball. It was the first thing people asked him about, when he walked into the supermarket near his apartment, or he stopped to buy a six-pack of Pocari Sweat at the convenience store. He’d be digging around in his wallet for that evil one-yen coin, and the old lady behind him would be like, ‘oh, you’re the Little Giant, aren’t you? What happened to volleyball? Why’d you quit?’ Then he’d find his evil one-yen coin, because things never come to you when you want them to, and things always come to you when it’s too late. ‘I’m going to Tokyo for college,’ he’d respond as he handed the one-yen coin over to the cashier, smiling politely over his shoulder. The old lady would nod at him in a way that suggested he was a conman who had just lied to her about her grandson’s whereabouts. The boy was not, in fact, stuck in a dumpster behind a Saizeriya. He was alive. In Iceland.

The titular question didn’t annoy him. It took both very much and very little to annoy Udai Tenma, whose automatic response to anything threatening was to run straight at it. But the way that people asked it did. There was always an undercurrent of pity in their voices, a hint of ‘I know you could’ve been so much more’ and ‘I’m sorry things turned out this way’ to their laughter. Though they were wrong. Of course they were wrong. Tenma had never spoken to anyone about the room with no exit; he had simply walked out.

“I am going to become god,” he declares, several years later. It’s the night before his first deadline of the week, which is the fake deadline Akaashi gave him after he set the real deadline on fire their first month working together. Akaashi is convinced that if Tenma tricks himself into thinking the deadline is tomorrow when it is, in fact, two days later, he will draw faster. Akaashi is wrong.

“You are not going to become god,” says Akaashi, who doesn’t know anything about being the shortest guy in the room, and is therefore wrong on principle. He pushes his glasses back up with his pointer finger. Tenma thinks, for the fifth time this month, that he would like to write a character like Akaashi into his next manga. “You are going to become the next best-selling mangaka in this magazine.”

Tenma laughs at him, though it ends up sounding more like a horse trying to sing Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love. “Akaashi.” He clears a space on his desk and rests his forehead on it. “Why are you like this.” Maybe his next manga will be about volleyball. Then he will have an excuse to write a character like Akaashi. Tenma will give him unicorn-colored hair and an anxiety-fueled tendency to catastrophize.

“I am like this,” says Akaashi, sipping from his Tokyo Disneysea coffee mug, “because I want the best for you.” Rainbow hair. Bright pink hair with streaks of turquoise. Like a popsicle.

Tenma turns his head away from him. “You sound like my mother.”

Akaashi probably pushes his glasses up again. He’s always doing that. Bokuto Koutarou probably told him it made him look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel on accident one time, and now he won’t stop doing it. “Your mother never played volleyball.”

Tenma sits up at his desk cheerily. “Yeah. But I did.”

  
::

  
He discovered the point of all his prepubescent angst when he was twenty-one. This was a relatively good time to discover anything about the universe, as he was still in college, and could thus afford to drastically upend his life in exchange for a few moments of peace. He felt almost vindicated on behalf of the boy with the orange hair and orange eyes, whose hand he shook on the third day of the Spring High. The orange boy sounded like a shounen manga protagonist with a few screws loose. Tenma liked him.

Standing under the bright lights of Tokyo, blinking the hope out of his eyes, Tenma also realized something else: this boy was not like him. This was probably why he liked him. Tenma the volleyball guy had been no one without his shortness, his angst, the way he railed against the genetics of height for skipping his turn on the way out. By contrast, Hinata Shouyou was everything. He was short as hell, loud as hell, bright as hell. Tenma blinked. He blinked again. Every time he did this, Hinata seemed to grow incrementally brighter, like a flashlight with a broken limiter.

Hinata Shouyou was at home on this court full of giants. Square peg in a round hole. Round peg in a hexagonal world. Who cared? Not him. For years and years to come, Tenma would remember this.

  
::

  
Ultimately, he didn’t become a mangaka because he couldn’t be a volleyball player. He probably could have been the short volleyball guy forever, if he had tried. He kept up with high school volleyball after he quit high school volleyball, because part of him felt obligated towards something he had spent so much of his youth on, and it stung a little, which he grew to appreciate. The sting reminded him of doing flying falls in Karasuno’s old gymnasium. It reminded him of being fifteen. It reminded him that he had once been one of those possessed with, if not dreams of spectacular caliber, then at least dreams of being tall. He had always wanted that. The height, and the authority that came with it. The godhood.

He didn’t become a mangaka because he was too short for volleyball. He realized this some time after talking to the orange boy on the orange court, hours before that boy was taken out of his second match like a planet pitched out of the sky. Or perhaps he had realized this even before that, when a seagull called Hoshiumi Kourai emerged from the blue of the sea and declared war on the world. It had never been an issue of couldn’t’s. It was always an issue of wouldn’t’s. Udai Tenma wouldn’t walk to the end of the line, in case there was nothing there, so he wouldn’t look over his shoulder, either. At the end of the day, he didn’t want to wait for someone to call his name first, so he left.

So he grows his hair out in college. He grows his hair out even more after college. He starts drawing manga, and he gets published, and Akaashi makes a comment awkwardly linking volleyball and the cutthroat manga industry together, in the hopes that Tenma will take the bait, and they will reminisce about their sweaty colorless youth over sake and peeled edamame. And his hair is still really long. And his regrets still look the way they did when he decided not to fight for volleyball after high school, and decided to let go. And he’s still not god, and the god in the bleachers was never really looking at him, just the after-image of the boy in the black jersey; and the kids he inspired grew up to be bigger than him, even if they never got any taller. But no one said strength had to come from holding your breath. There are between nine thousand and ten thousand species of birds on earth. Not all of them can fly. But most of them have seen the ocean.

And love can be anything you want it to be, even if you’re not standing on that six-man court, with that punched-out heart and those big dark eyes anymore. Love can be a shounen manga about volleyball, if you decide to draw that prophecy. You can already see the opening pages, the way the ball will bleed across the seam of the story. The protagonist has a few screws loose. His team is the equivalent of a walking arson incident. They start their journey in a municipal high school in Miyagi that hasn’t seen the spotlight in years, though they saw it once, though you were the one who glimpsed that shiny gymnasium first, through the eyes of a black bird with a love of miracles.

And one day in the distant and irrefutable future, they’ll get so close to the sky, you will see them when you look out the window each morning, these boys with wings of steel, their fingers stretched towards the white circle of the sun. And you will think: I’m glad I quit volleyball. And you will think: I’m glad I stayed.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> quote at the front is from 'we manage most when we manage small' by linda gregg.  
> when i did the 'haikyuu characters i most resemble' thing on twitter a while back i got a lot of udai tenma's, even more than i got miya atsumu's (though i also got a lot of miya atsumu's), so i was very happy when i was given the opportunity to write about the titular little giant. i think he is very cool. played up the yearning a bit in the past-tense scenes because i like to think that by the time we first bumped into him at the age of twenty (20) one (1) whatever angst he had had had long since evaporated. nonetheless i believe it was there at one point, if only because i walk around carrying angst like a six-pack of pocari sweat myself. no projection was involved in the writing of this fic. none at all. on a brighter note, i borrowed from the 'udai tenma is gonna write haikyuu in chapter 402' theory so if sunday comes and puts a steel baseball bat through that idea then we can just pretend the last three or four paragraphs are, like, metaphors.  
> thank you so much for giving this brief character study a chance, you are a mario kart nintendo ds version star. as per usual, if you liked what you saw, please feel free to leave kudos or comments, but the pilot pen you broke when you were nine is good too. hope you're all hanging tight as we officially hit the mid-point of july, the Fake Month. it's fake. don't try and convince me otherwise, i have seen the truth and now i can never close my eyes again.
> 
> have a good one


End file.
